The University of Michigan has a long tradition of politically active students, dating back to the Vietnam War protests. That is why Edie Goldenberg, a political-science professor there, was shocked to learn the percentage of students at the school who cast ballots in the last midterm election: just 14 percent.

“It was a wake-up call,” Dr. Goldenberg said. “Nobody realized that so few students were turning out to vote.”

Dr. Goldenberg has now set a goal for this November’s elections of more than doubling student turnout. And the university itself is getting behind the effort by challenging its Big Ten football rivals to a competition to see which school can get more students to vote in the midterms.

College campuses are often seen as hotbeds of political engagement, with controversial speakers routinely kicking up loud protests. But abysmally low turnout among young people has long been a hallmark of American elections, particularly in midterm years. Data suggests that only 18 percent voted in 2014, compared with about 37 percent in the overall population.

Now a growing number of universities are using their institutional power to increase student turnout on their campuses, spurred by a desire to develop students into better citizens. And schools like the University of Michigan are armed with data showing them for the first time which kinds of students are voting and which are not, so they can target their efforts and measure which strategies work.

“It’s exciting that colleges are starting to wake up to the role that they should play to teaching people how to be citizens of democracy,” said Robert J. Donahue, associate director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Northwestern University. “Hopefully we’ll live up to the charge and start turning out more active citizens and not just scholars.”

The new emphasis on voting — among a population that tends to vote Democrat — comes as the nation gears up for a high-stakes midterm election. It is unclear whether the efforts to increase student turnout will impact the nation’s political map. Among the students who vote, many cast absentee ballots for districts where they grew up.

But about three dozen House races considered competitive this year were won in 2016 by margins smaller than the number of college students living in the district.

Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican, won by 1,621 votes in a district with more than 51,000 students. More than half attend the University of California, San Diego, which has set up a student-organized “voter access” committee to push turnout in the fall.

Representative Claudia Tenney, a New York Republican, won by 15,178 votes, a number smaller than the student body at Binghamton University, which is giving out prizes — such as foosball tables or television sets — to the residence hall that registers the highest percentage of voters.

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Pencils printed with the address for Eastern Tennessee State University’s voter registration website.CreditTravis Dove for The New York Times

School administrators involved in raising student turnout insist that their efforts are not focused on any one election or political party. Instead, they cite an urgent need to combat a troubling decline in political participation. Voter turnout in the United States has declined since the 1960s for nearly every age group.

Young people have the lowest turnout rates of all because they are more transient and have not yet established the habit of voting, said Kenneth R. Mayer, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“They don’t have concerns of property taxes, schools and other things that make older people go to the polls,” he said. The likelihood of voting increases steadily with age, until about 80, when illnesses begin to prevent habitual voters from casting a ballot, he said.

Young people who do vote tend to favor Democrats. According to a Pew Research Center poll, 58 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds either identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party.

That is the reason some conservatives complain when students flock to the polls, especially in rural places where students outnumber lifelong residents.

In New Hampshire, where Representative Carol Shea-Porter, a Democrat, won by 4,904 votes in 2016 in a district with more than 30,000 students, student voting has ignited fierce debates and baseless charges of fraud.

Despite a Supreme Court ruling that college students can vote where they attend school, New Hampshire is one of a number of states weighing new measures that would make it harder for out-of-state students to vote. Citizens Count NH, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group promoting citizen engagement in New Hampshire, has received hundreds of complaints from state residents about students who vote locally for Democrats and then swiftly move away.

“Must be a LEGAL resident, to vote in state,” one man wrote on the group’s online forum. “Not a temporary guest of the educational system.”

School administrators say they are simply encouraging civic participation, and many make no distinction between students who vote locally or absentee.

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Student volunteers registered voters at a Comic-Con event at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City.CreditTravis Dove for The New York Times

Efforts to bolster student turnout have been aided by a new national study that analyzes voting behavior on campuses across the country.

The study aims to assess how well schools are doing at preparing students to be active citizens in a democracy, said Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University, who oversees the study.

The study, which matches enrollment records with voting records, began in 2013 with a modest expectation of getting a few hundred colleges to participate. Today, it includes voting data from more than nine million students on 1,100 campuses in all 50 states. Identifying information has been removed from the data to protect students’ privacy.

The data has unearthed a series of fascinating insights about the 2016 elections: Social science majors had higher turnout than math and science majors (53 percent versus 44 percent). Female students had higher turnout than males (52 percent versus 44 percent). Asian students turned out at a far lower rate than their peers (31 percent versus 53 percent for white students, 50 percent for black students and 46 percent for Hispanic students).

“This initiative will hopefully motivate educators to teach students across disciplines why they should not take democracy for granted,” Dr. Thomas said.

In the last election, there were big increases in student turnout in New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, but declines in Georgia, Wisconsin and Mississippi. Some campuses have especially low turnout rates — for instance, only 30 percent of eligible voters during a presidential election year — while others have rates as high as 70 percent. Student turnout nationwide was 49 percent versus about 60 percent overall.

The emergence of data has also led schools to compete with one another over voter turnout, which is increasingly seen as a proxy for a politically engaged student body.

Two college athletic conferences have begun giving out trophies to the schools with the highest voter turnout and the most improved turnout, based on the data generated by the Tufts study. A new initiative called the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge offers awards to schools that stand out in civic engagement. And this year, for the first time, Washington Monthly magazine intends to include voter turnout rates in its college rankings.

The Tufts study affirmed the efforts of campuses that had already made civic engagement a priority. The University of Missouri-St. Louis held a series of forums about race, equity and trauma in the wake of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, a black teenager, in Ferguson, Mo. In 2016, 67 percent of students there turned out to vote.

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East Tennessee State University was awarded a trophy for improving student turnout. Voting rates rose from 38 percent in 2012 to 47 percent in 2016.CreditTravis Dove for The New York Times

“On these campuses with high voting rates, they talk politics all the time,” Dr. Thomas said. “Students say ‘I see myself as a voter.’ Not ‘I voted today,’ but ‘I am a voter.’ It is an identity.”

And at Northwestern University, which incorporated voter registration into orientation for new students in 2011, over 91 percent of students were registered to vote. In 2016, 64 percent of Northwestern students cast ballots, up from 49 percent in 2012.

But at other universities, the Tufts study set off soul-searching and outrage.

At Furman University in South Carolina, just 24 percent voted in the 2012 elections and only 8 percent voted in the midterms in 2014.

“I saw our numbers were really low,” said Sulaiman Ahmad, a Furman student who spearheaded the efforts on campus to increase turnout as part of a voting competition among the Southern Conference.

The son of Pakistani immigrants who moved to South Carolina in the 1970s, Mr. Ahmad said he got involved in the voting challenge to counteract the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the recent presidential election and to “humanize Muslims” at his school.

But in the effort to increase voter turnout among his classmates, he faced an unusual obstacle: the Greenville County Board of Voter Registration and Elections refused to register out-of-state students unless they filled out a special questionnaire that asked about ties to the local community, including church membership and whether their parents claimed them as dependents on income taxes.

Mr. Ahmad and two of his friends filed a lawsuit challenging the practice, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. A judge ruled in their favor, reversing a 1973 ruling in a similar lawsuit filed by Furman students. In 2016, Furman’s turnout increased to 30 percent.

Looking ahead to this fall, colleges and students are beginning to plan activities to bolster their voting rates.

At Arizona State University, staff are hoping to hire musicians to perform for students waiting in line to vote to generate excitement around the election. Mercer University in Georgia has changed its online portal so that students who are registering for classes online can also register to vote through TurboVote.

East Tennessee State University has never won a football championship in the Southern Conference. But in October, in a ceremony on the football field, the school received a trophy for most improved turnout. The victory came after the school held 30 civic events, including a voter registration party featuring a bluegrass band, political quizzes and a photo booth where students dressed up as Uncle Sam. Voting rates rose from 38 percent in 2012 to 47 percent in 2016.

Now Nathan Farnor, a senior at the school, has been hired temporarily by the university to increase student interest in the coming midterms. In a county where just 27,612 people cast ballots in 2014, the school’s 15,000 students could hold a lot of sway if they turned out to vote.

“A lot of people don’t participate in midterm elections, because they don’t see what the point is,” Mr. Farnor said. But “if students really wanted to campaign, they definitely have a lot of bargaining power.”

Robert Gebeloff contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Trophies And Foosball To Motivate Young Voters. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe